1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to systems and methods for determining how information from any information system changes over time, and more particularly, determining how information from the internet changes over time.
2. Description of the Related Art
Technology development has centered around the Internet for the past decade, and almost a billion people are currently online. One of the leading developments continues to be information retrieval. Leading search engines let users search through 10's of if not 100's of billions of documents and return results judged by some metric of relevance. The leading commercial search engines have become very good at matching keywords and analyzing link structure to determine how relevant a result is to a user. The online advertising business has also steered the technology away from some of the more traditional academic foci for information retrieval and focused on how to monetize keywords.
Today the criteria for a good search engine is relevance. Relevance is a fuzzy word and does not let you know if a document has a negative or positive connotation or if that document is reaching more or less people. Since the beginning of civilization, people have made decisions based on how good or bad something is and based on how many people are aware of the information. It seems odd that such critical information would be missing from search engines, but this is a result of commercial focus on keywords.
Precision, recall, fallout, accuracy and error are all metrics used to determine how well an information retrieval system works. Initially search engines would return based just on words, then on citation ranking and currently are focusing on ranking algorithms. All of these approaches have used the five metrics of precision, recall, fallout, accuracy and error with a focus on a single independent variable—keywords. By using new independent variables, a much richer understanding of information is available.
There is a need for systems and methods that compute changes in information over time. There is a further need for systems and methods that provide a computable way to globally determine any change in any type of data.